Author

Edward Harrison 7559 posts 575 comments

Edward Harrison is the founder of Credit Writedowns and a former career diplomat, investment banker and technology executive with over twenty five years of business experience. He has also been a regular economic and financial commentator in print and on television for the past decade. He speaks six languages and reads another five, skills he uses to provide a more global perspective. Edward holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University and a BA in Economics from Dartmouth College.

Political Economy

Our over-reliance on monetary policy is the problem

Edward Harrison Aug 16, 2019

I am going to argue here that monetary policy is both less effective than fiscal policy, and that over-reliance on it unnecessarily politicizes monetary policy by putting unelected officials in too prominent an economic role. I would argue…

Monetary System

The Fed overtightened. Now it’s behind the curve. Recession awaits

Edward Harrison Aug 15, 2019

Sorry for the alarmist post title. But the Fed has completely bottled it. I've been warning for some time that it could go this way. And now, we are in in the endgame. First, the Fed overtightened through 2018. Then, forced at gunpoint by…

Daily

Why my base case for 2020 is recession

Edward Harrison Aug 13, 2019

Back at the end of July, I was talking about my macro thesis. And I led off writing this: The US is the laggard in this slowing but is affected as well. From a markets perspective, that means a convergence to zero, with yield curves…

Daily

Competitive currency devaluation and the currency war

Edward Harrison Aug 7, 2019

The US is the cleanest shirt Last week, I was talking to Megan Greene, the former chief economist at John Hancock for an interview on the US and European economies. And she said something that resonated with me about the global growth…

Daily

The trade-currency war will crystallize downside risks

Edward Harrison Aug 6, 2019

Yesterday, the overarching message of my post was this bit: "as we think of potential outcomes, policy error has to be a real concern here, especially in 2020 once the cumulative impact of all this takes its full measure." I don't think the…

Daily

Trade war escalation highlights downside economic risks

Edward Harrison Aug 5, 2019

The big story today is the potential for a currency war, emanating from the escalating trade war between the US and China. But there's a considerable degree of data flow that I want to parse to give a more complete macro view. Having…

Daily

A variety of pre-FOMC thoughts on the economy

Edward Harrison Jul 31, 2019

My macro view What's my overall thesis at this juncture? It's that the global economy is slowing and is likely to slow further before it picks up. The US is the laggard in this slowing but is affected as well. From a markets perspective,…

Monetary System

Why what economists are now saying about inflation matters

Edward Harrison Jul 30, 2019

The US Personal Income and Outlays report for June 2019 came out this morning. It showed personal income increasing 0.4% and wages and salaries increasing 0.5% last month. These are good numbers. And in conjunction with a lot of other data…

Political Economy

US GDP report puts nail in the coffin for the recession story

Edward Harrison Jul 26, 2019

The latest US GDP report was just released showing the US economy expanded at a 2.1% annualized rate in the second quarter of 2019. This was marginally better than expectations for a 1.8% increase, and significantly above the Atlanta Fed's…

Daily

The awful news coming out of Germany

Edward Harrison Jul 25, 2019

Yesterday, I highlighted Germany in terms of downside global economic risk. We are experiencing a manufacturing- and trade-led deceleration in global growth. Germany is the most prominent large Western economy leveraged to both.

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